Telberg, Val. Val Telberg. April 11- July 3, 1983.

San Francisco Museum of Art, 1983. Introduction by Van Deren Coke. Exhibition catalog, 56 pages with 40 examples of Telberg's photomontages and biographical information. Wraps, fine.  Summary:

Val Telberg: Surreal Poet of the Mind is a 56-page exhibition catalog published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Produced on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition that ran from April 11 to July 3, 1983, the publication features an introduction by influential curator and photo historian Van Deren Coke.

The catalog serves as a landmark reassessment of Moscow-born American artist Val Telberg (1910–1995), a crucial mid-century innovator who utilized darkroom experimentation to challenge the boundaries of documentary photography.

Key Content and Themes

• Visualizing the Subconscious: The catalog compiles 40 premier examples of Telberg’s black-and-white photomontages. The imagery focuses heavily on the human figure—often layered, distorted, and rendered in states of kinetic motion—to evoke a dreamlike weightlessness, fantasy, and the psychological depths of the human unconscious.

• Cinematic Dissolves and Technique: A central focus of the text is Telberg's pioneering mastery of analog multi-negative printing. Inspired by the "dissolve" techniques of motion picture film, Telberg layered sandwich-style combinations of distinct negatives onto a single sheet of photographic paper, creating fluid, ethereal narratives where the outside world and internal human psychology physically intersect.

• Literary and Artistic Intersections: The catalog traces Telberg's alignment with mid-century avant-garde subcultures. It explores how his post-surrealist visual philosophy seamlessly translated into other artistic media, highlighting his noted 1950s collaborations with avant-garde author Anaïs Nin, for whom he provided dreamlike illustrations for the text House of Incest.

• A Fragmented Career Revived: The biographical sections trace Telberg's unconventional trajectory, from his background in chemistry and painting at the Art Students League to his early-career photography boom in New York under the guidance of major museum curators. It details his subsequent decades-long hiatus to run a family business, framing the 1983 exhibition as a profound late-life critical revival.

Significance

Val Telberg: Surreal Poet of the Mind acts as an essential retrospective record that firmly re-anchored Telberg within the history of twentieth-century American modernism. By evaluating his complex, multi-layered visual poetry, the catalog underscores his legacy as one of the few mid-century masters who successfully utilized the camera not to record physical reality, but to map the landscape of the human soul.

Note: On February 14, 1910, in Moscow, Russia, Vladimir “Val” Telberg was born. For political reasons, the Telbergs moved to China after the Russian Revolution, where Telberg got a scholarship in 1928 to attend Wittenberg College in Ohio for four years, after which he returned to China.  Unrest in the 1930s led the family to resettle in the New York area.  Telberg began taking classes in painting at the Art Students League.  An odd job developing film for night club camera women got him more interested in photography.  Influenced by motion picture film dissolves, he began making photomontages.  He became known for dreamlike photographs from multiple negatives of the human figure. Edward Steichen, Director of Photography at MoMA, began acquiring his work and exhibited Telberg in In and Out of Focus (1948), Photographs by 51 Photographers (1950), and The Sense of Abstraction (1960).  After his father’s death in 1954, Telberg, who by that time was married with two children, had to take over the family’s mail order book business.  He gave up artwork until the late 1970s at his home in Sag Harbor, where he died in 1995.  In addition to the catalog for his 1983 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Telberg can be found in other photography publications, including The Multiple Image (1972).